The Berlin Wall

Preventing brain drain and smugglers. Prices were fixed in the East and smugglers would buy on the cheap in the East and sell for a profit in the West. Berlin should have never been divided in two in the first place, this was proposed by the the western powers to have a foothold for counter-revolutionary activity. It was their ploy, and their ludicrous plans. https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Anti-Fascist_Protection_Rampart

Holodomor

see this page https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Holodomor and the one linked at the top there as well.

Freedom of speech

Freedom of speech is a recent asinine invention. Did they have freedom of speech during the Terror? No, because you need to control propaganda and counter-revolutionary activity. You could protest for tons of things in the USSR btw, but you couldn't protest to call for the dissolution of the socialist system. Pretty reasonable.

Afghanistan

The legitimate government of Afghanistan asked the USSR for help against the Mujahideen funded by the CIA. The goal of the US was to draw the USSR in a long proxy war, putting Afghans at risk, to drain their military resources. https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Soviet_intervention_in_Afghanistan

If you want to go there the US was the one who had no reason to be there, once again meddling into another country's affairs. They also committed the Highway of Death massacre. I don't get why you care so much about what a country that has not existed for 30 years did some 50 years ago when you have a very much alive and very much barbaric country doing worse right now.

Eastern Europe hates USSR

They don't. I don't know where you get your news but you should look for another source.

The countries that see more benefit than harm were the countries that were mostly left out. A developing country will have unequal development so this isn't surprising. Turkmenistan represented 3 million inhabitants out of almost 300 million. You also have to take into account where these countries came from before the revolution but I digress.

North Korea

Why are you refusing to talk about them? Go ahead. Talk about them. I know what you're gonna say. You're gonna say the exact same thing your "progressive" media of choice is saying about the DPRK. What your school says about the DPRK. What TV says about the DPRK. Things we've heard hundreds of times before that we used to believe too (I hope you don't think we used to live under a rock before we emerged as communists) until we actually started reading source material about the DPRK and realized it's actually not at all like the media says it is.

state atheism

who cares seriously. Plenty of people don't live in secular countries but they themselves are atheists or non-practicing and they don't whine half as much as you do about it. We have communists on this platform living in officially Muslim countries like Indonesia or Iran and they don't give a shit about it. Seems like the most random thing to complain about. Just reeks of western privilege. Do you think people in Tsarist Russia had a choice to be atheist? How do you think that would fare for you when the Field Marshal came by your village to investigate potential revolutionary activities and he, as a faithful Orthodox Christian, learned you hadn't been in church for a month or more. Get some perspective.

Great firewall

So that they could develop their own tech solutions. I don't see what's so difficult about it. Oh, the horror, China does not have access to shitty braindead tiktoks, we need to bring them freedom in the form of ICBMs! Seriously, who gives a shit. Have you asked the Chinese what they think of the firewall? They don't care. They love their local tech solutions, their own social media, and the laws surrounding it. They get a VPN if they want to see whatever the fuck racist crackers are saying about them and COVID-19 conspiracy theories. And then they realize, damn we have it good in China.

I can’t do good if I ignore the atrocities committed by the people “on my team”.

So instead of "ignoring the atrocities on your team" (in your words), you just go straight for state department propaganda. But I don't think anyone here is under any illusions you're on our team.

You seem somewhat reasonable, so I hope you can realize these two things: - you can't bring up anything we haven't heard before and - everything you were taught about communism is wrong; we don't love Stalin for killing Ukrainians, we simply have evidence to show that it did not happen like you believe it did. These are two very different things.